Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. As midterm Election Day approaches, Supreme Court justices return to the bench Monday for their next two-week argument session, which features a case that is poised to bring the latest expansion of religion in public life.
While much of the nation’s attention will be on the ballot box and vote tallies on Tuesday, that morning the justices will hear a challenge from Catholic schools who argue that Colorado’s universal preschool program violates their rights by not exempting them from serving LGBTQ families. The state says that it “requires all preschools — secular and religious alike — to deliver publicly-funded services without excluding families based on protected-class status.” The hearing should indicate whether St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy will be the court’s latest endorsement of religious rights or an exception to that trend.
This week the court was relatively quiet, with the main action (as of Friday afternoon) coming in a shadow docket order on Tuesday. The justices refused to grant an application, brought by a legal aid group and Democratic-led cities with large immigrant populations, that urged the court to halt what they called “egregious collusion” between Texas and the federal government.
The red state challenged a Biden-era rule that gave immigration judges discretion to pause removal proceedings to promote efficiency or protect due process rights. When the state brought the case against the Trump administration, the latter immediately joined Texas in a motion against the rule. A sympathetic judge, Reed O’Connor, blessed the deal and vacated the rule nationwide.
No justices dissented from the order declining the application from Centro Legal de la Raza and Baltimore, Maryland, Columbus, Ohio, and New Haven, Connecticut, which warned the high court of the “collusion that infected this suit from its inception.” They said that letting the deal stand would mean that “such collusive suits will surely proliferate further.” Now that the court has denied the application, we shall see.
President Donald Trump also got some good news on his personal docket, when the court ordered a response from Hillary Clinton to Trump’s bid to revive a civil lawsuit against her and others. Hoping the justices would summarily deny Trump’s petition, Clinton and her civil co-defendants initially waived their right to oppose the president’s attempt to resurrect the suit, in which he claimed they conspired ahead of the 2016 election to “weave a false narrative” that his campaign colluded with Russia.
Read the rest of my roundup here.
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